Wealth & Money Quote by William Lyon Phelps

In an era when reputations were traded like currency and the middle class lived one bank panic away from ruin, Phelps draws a hard line between what society can seize and what it can only tempt you to surrender. The sentence is built like a moral inventory: money, job, home - the pillars of security - are explicitly framed as contingent, vulnerable to “someone else.” Then comes the pivot: “but remember,” a teacher’s phrase, less like poetry than a chalkboard admonition. He’s not consoling; he’s coaching. The real audience isn’t the person being robbed. It’s the person on the verge of compromising.

The subtext is that honor is not a possession so much as a practice. You can lose everything without shame, he suggests, but you cannot keep honor without active choice. That’s a subtle rebuke to the common instinct to treat misfortune as moral failure, especially in early-20th-century America’s merit-soaked worldview. Phelps offers a counter-metric for dignity: your worth is not your station, and your character is not your résumé.

The line also performs a neat rhetorical trick: it sounds empowering while placing responsibility squarely back on the individual. “No one can ever take away your honor” is only true if you accept his definition of honor as internally governed. In public life, people can smear you, isolate you, rewrite your story. What they can’t do is force you to cooperate with that story by betraying your own standards. That’s the pressure point Phelps is trying to protect.